Australia's safe climate vision

Climate campaigner Al Gore launched a new organisation at a one thousand head breakfast in Melbourne last week. Safe Climate Australia has a goal to develop a whole-of-society plan to restructure Australia's economy, transitioning it out of fossil fuels to 'net-zero carbon' -at emergency speed. Alexandra de Blas explores the safe climate vision and how it might be realised.

Transcript

Now you may have caught some of the news reports about Al Gore's visit to Australia last week. But I wonder how many of you actually know why he was here?

All of the discussion I heard and read focused on Mr Gore's opinion of Australia's planned ETS, or emissions trading scheme, and on the forthcoming international climate change conference in Copenhagen. Serious issues, no doubt, but while he was in Australia, Al Gore actually launched a new organisation.

So what's the name of the organisation and what are its specific goals?

This report from Alexander de Blas.

Man: We're running in November this year, one month before the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit.

Man: We'll complete a 6,000 kilometre run, linking Australia's most precious, revered, great natural systems threatened by global warming. We'll run from the World Heritage rainforest of the Daintree, the wet tropics, through the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest living structure, which is under immediate threat from coral bleaching.

Woman: Right down the east coast to the beauty of the Australian Alps.

Alexandra de Blas: That's a taste of the run for a safe climate, one of the fundraising and awareness projects of Safe Climate Australia.

At a quarter-to-seven on a dark, chilly morning last week, a thousand people filed like ants into an enormous shed at Melbourne's docklands. They were there to hear the words of Nobel prize-winning environmentalist, Al Gore, who was launching a new climate leadership organisation.

The guest list was extensive, spanning across industry, government, agriculture, finance, manufacturing, the community, and the arts. There was even a handful of climate change deniers outside.

Al Gore: Safe Climate Australia is a wonderful initiative, apolitical, solutions-based, science-based, bringing together business leaders, leaders in the scientific community, the arts community, emergency firefighters, people from all walks of life, to respond to what many scientists have now been saying is truly a planetary emergency. And that phrase is one that still sounds a bit shrill to most ears, because we're not used to hearing such a phrase.

A leader some 50 years ago in the aftermath of the attack in my country on Pearl Harbor during an investigation of why it wasn't predicted in advance, and one of the explanations for why there were no preparations to anticipate that attack, was in an interesting phrase, they said, 'We as human beings tend to confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.' And of course if something's never happened before, it's a generally safe assumption that it's not going to happen in the future.

The problem is, the exceptions can kill you, and this is one of those exceptions.

Alexandra de Blas: Safe Climate Australia grew out of the book Climate Code Red, which developed the case for emergency action. Written by Melbourne-based authors David Spratt and Phillip Sutton, it was published by Scribe last year. Both are Safe Climate Australia foundation members, and Phillip Sutton is director of the Greenleap Strategic Institute.

Phillip Sutton: What we're going to do, one of the major things we're going to do, is to develop a transition plan. We've managed to show that Safe Climate is a good idea but then the next problem for people will be to say, 'But how can you actually do it, is it feasible in the real world?' So we're now going to be able to tap into a whole bunch of research organisations, universities, major corporations with the skill base and talent bank that they've got, and start to pull together a team which will actually work out how we can make this transition very fast, the physical changes, the social changes, the economic changes, how do you manage that, how do get the investments going?

On the one hand it's a very big task, on the other hand I think what we've demonstrated is a skill to actually hone down to the core essential elements; that makes it easier for other people to be involved. Climate change, and particularly the solutions, is a very complicated issue, and action's not going to happen effectively unless people know where to put their effort, and most people, it's just too big and they don't know how to handle it. So I think that what we're doing at Safe Climate Australia, is working through that complexity, and reducing it down, not the simplistic approaches, but to the most coherent and highly refined approach to it, so people can see exactly how they can make a really major contribution.

Alexandra de Blas: What do you actually mean by safe climate? What is that?

Phillip Sutton: For 10,000 years our world has been in a warm state, a naturally warm state, and that's the period during which human civilisation emerged. It clearly was a time when all the species on the planet could survive. I mean in a sense, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about at least in terms of temperature, turning the clock back 30, 50 years, but not turning the economy back 30 or 50 years. So we're going to have to invent a new economy that can live with the temperature about the level it would have been 50 years ago.

Alexandra de Blas: What's the problem with the sort of dominant paradigm, which is that we can allow carbon dioxide concentrations to rise to 450 parts per million, but we mustn't let the temperature go beyond the two-degree dangerous level. So how does that compare to Safe Climate Australia's approach?

Phillip Sutton: Well the thing is, we now realise that in fact two degrees is not safe; it's not a case of being safe under two degrees and then dangerous over two degrees, two degrees is actually sitting inside the dangerous zone. Secondly, if we get to two degrees, the world temperature will not stay at two, it'll keep going. There'll be a huge amount of carbon dioxide released and methane released from the Arctic Ocean area and from the permafrost, two degrees is extraordinarily dangerous, but it will trigger ongoing increases in temperature, possibly up to 10 or more degrees warming. So what's happened is politically, people, at one stage say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people thought two degrees was actually the upper boundary of what was safe. The scientists now know that that's not true, but they haven't been able to find a way of expressing that, to actually get the political process to take it on board, so we've actually been trapped in what was once thought to be a safe target, that is now known clearly not to be.

Al Gore: Some truths really are inconvenient, and some actions really are difficult. Change itself is difficult, but change, even the most difficult changes, sometimes turn out to be very positive, once one commits oneself to that change. This crisis is gaining momentum. Today we will put another 70 million tonnes of CO2 into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. We still have time, they assure us, almost all of them, there are a few pessimists who quarrel with that, but most all of them say Yes, we still have time to avoid the worst and most horrific consequences of this crisis, but we have to act.

Alexandra de Blas: Safe Climate Australia aims to be an example project inspiring similar initiatives around the world. It's to be guided by a scientific advisory committee and Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is a member. He's also director of the Centre for Marine Studies at the University of Queensland.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg: Well we've known for a long while in the scientific community that it doesn't take much CO2 into the atmosphere to have major effects on ecosystems. And over the years I've been studying the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, and we've known for a decade that if you double CO2, you don't have a Great Barrier Reef any more.

I think the latest science, especially that which was presented in March in Copenhagen, has shaken us up even more, because it's telling us that things like the great ice sheets of the world are now melting very rapidly. Now if they do, and we continue down this pathway which is above the worst case scenario of the IPCC, we end up in a world in which we may have — well, we certainly have one metre, we may actually have three to four metres of sea-level rise around the planet. Now that would be devastating. That's a civilisation wrecker. You've just to think about this harbour where we're sitting right now, two metres of sea level, you don't have this very spot. The messages from Copenhagen were very clear, we're above the worst case scenario, it's happening a lot quicker than we thought, and we now have little time to fix it. It's not going to be easy, but by the same token, we haven't even started.

The analogy is always drawn to step changes in behavior, such as Pearl Harbor for the US, where you go from making cars to tanks within a month. You can turn an economy up on its head and still survive, and I think that's what we've got to do with the climate change problem. It's so massive, it's really looming as a planetary tragedy, and we've got to treat it as it is. It's an emergency, and it needs emergency action.

Alexandra de Blas: What do you see is different about the planet that Safe Climate Australia is going to produce?

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg: Well Safe Climate Australia is facing up to the science, not the political, the convenient decisions. This is what we're seeing, we're seeing a world that's tied up in politics, and is actually making decisions which are going to be disastrous for the planet. If you look at the science, it's telling us we can't go anywhere near 450 parts per million, or two degrees celsius above the industrial global temperatures. We've already got crises on our hand, with only point-seven of a degree increasing global temperature.

Now you look at that, and you go 'Well actually, what do we need to do?' Well the solutions are there, we've got the technology, and in fact Australia squandered its opportunities in a couple of areas, like solar: the two major advances, the people who are actually changing China and the US, are Australian trained. You've only got to go into the average university in Australia, and you'll find the solutions are there on the shelf. What we're not doing is we're not going 'OK, well let's get on with it. Let's make a business case for expanding this type of technology in Australia.'

Alexandra de Blas: VicSuper, the Victorian government's preferred super fund, was a partner in the launch last week. It acts as an investor on behalf of 250,000 beneficiaries. So why is it backing an organisation which some would see as on the radical fringe? I put that to VicSuper CEO, Bob Welsh.

Bob Welsh:We adopted sustainability as our central operating principle back in 2000, with the aim to build a sustainable super fund. So climate change we see as one of the major environmental risks and of course it's an economic risk for future investment returns, so to us it was a natural fit for VicSuper to provide support to the objectives of Safe Climate.

Alexandra de Blas: What appeals to you about Safe Climate, and the plan that they're going to produce?

Bob Welsh:A couple of things. The first thing is that Safe Climate is really saying what is the level of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, where we can be confident we have a climate which we can work within to lead fulfilling and prosperous lives. And the scientists are saying that at the time when the Industrial Revolution took us back 250 years ago, the CO2 concentration was around about 280 parts per million. Now we're about 389 parts per million. The scientists are saying that we need somewhere around about 285 to 325 parts per million for us to be confident that we have a climate that will support the quality of life that we all aspire to.

So VicSuper saw that it makes sense from an investment perspective as well, because having a target which is in that range, which provides some certainty about where we need to get to, of course we don't know yet how we're going to get there, but we just sort of know where the target is. I mean uncertainty is one of the big issues with any investment process, and even though we have uncertainty in that we're way above that level, the fact that we've got a target which the scientists are saying is a level that we could be more confident about the future, means that we have got a goal.

Alexandra de Blas: So is it the goal that's the most important thing or is it the plan that they say they'll produce?

Bob Welsh: The goal's important, because that's our target. The plan is important because it gives us a solutions-oriented approach to the problem.

Alexandra de Blas: We hear a lot from business about the concerns they have about taking action on climate change, but how much opportunity do you see out there?

Bob Welsh: I see opportunity everywhere. To me, it's just a question of saying, 'Well, we produce products and services that people need for a high quality life, all we need to do is to work out how to change the way in which we produce those products and services, as well as change the products and services themselves'. So that's got to be one of the greatest investment opportunities of all time.

Alexandra de Blas: Safe Climate Australia CEO Brendan Condon sees the formation of this organisation as a historic meeting of minds. Bringing together lead thinkers, proponents and practitioners across all sectors of the economy, who can help to reduce emissions and move to a net zero carbon economy.

One of the key tasks ahead is fundraising. They estimate it will cost $1.6 million a year to run the organisation. And that money now needs to be raised.

But what exactly will Safe Climate do?

Brendan Condon: Quite a narrow focus really. We want to develop and research and map and economically model what a zero carbon Australia would look like. The research piece is a two to three year piece, and then we'll look at whatever iteration happens after that. It'll need to continue to be refined into the future, but we set a very clear time line that we would like to have the first version of this plan in 12 months, and then the final version in two years. If we can achieve the resources required and then we think we'll able to assemble the Brains Trust very quickly, and also the associations with the research institutes, and also the practitioners in the field, to pull together a very practical, credible costed and modeled plan.

Alexandra de Blas: One of your first projects is pulling together the science; why is it important for your organisation to look at the science and set the targets? Hasn't the science been done to death already?

Brendan Condon: It's very clear that we want to keep this project calibrated to the best breaking science on global warming. So it needs to be totally current with the science. We're seeing a science emerging all the time, so we have a scientific advisory group who are going to aggregate that science, they're not reinventing any wheels, it's just an aggregation process, which informs the practical plan.

Alexandra de Blas: If the science project is one of the first cabs off the rank, what are some of the others to follow?

Brendan Condon: One of the major fundraising initiatives starts in November, which is the National Run for a Safe Climate, with emergency service workers, who are doing their 6,000 kilometre run to raise funds and awareness around say Climate Australia, with around 40 serving members of the emergency services. And then the next thing will be the development of the research group and within that group we have a research director and underpinning that we have a number of researchers who are working across the sectors of the economy, the carbon-emitting sectors of the economy, actually pulling together the solutions framework.

So for instance, if you drill down we'll have researchers looking at the stationary energy sector, and having a look at very practical questions. For instance, what percentage of our stationary energy sector can be supplied with solar thermal, wind, geothermal, how do we design an integrated National Smart Group, that interfaces with renewable energies with the variability of renewable energies? What is the current state of play with global storage technologies that can store energy and then dispatch energy on demand? So how do we rework the National Smart Group?

So we'll have an in-house team looking at that, and they'll be interfacing with the lead research institutes such as the Australian National University Solar Thermal Research Group; very much it's a practitioner-based piece of research as well. We'll be reaching in to the practitioners and pulling out industry information and seconding talented people from those organisations to help accelerate the project.

Alexandra de Blas: Isn't this something that one would expect to be done by government?

Brendan Condon: Look, it's a very comprehensive risk management scenario planning exercise for the whole of the economy, and at the moment we're not seeing that level of risk response from government. So I guess we're stepping into a vacuum, and we believe that governments globally will eventually take up the mantle. We're looking at a very positive and constructive dialogue with government, we're looking actually to second some very talented people from government into the project. We think government would be very interested in the work we're doing.

Alexandra de Blas: Brendan Condon, CEO of Safe Climate Australia.

You're with Future Tense, on ABC Radio National. I'm Alexandra de Blas.

Ian Dunlop is a former chair of the Australian Coal Association, and former CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He now works internationally as an independent adviser on sustainability and governance. He too, is a founding member of Safe Climate Australia.

Ian Dunlop: Any sensible risk management process that you would use if you were a corporate manager or something, you would have been doing something on this years ago. Now because it's so big and it's so all-encompassing in terms of impact, but I think we know what to do, we know the solutions, it can be quite scary, when you think about these things. There's no question there's going to be a lot of transition issues that have to be handled. But we can do all that, we've done it before, in major industry reform. We just need to get on with it.

Alexandra de Blas: When you look at the amount of opposition, to even believing climate change is happening in Australia, let alone implementing plans, it would seem that this plan will attract a lot of opposition. How do you think you're going to deal with that?

Ian Dunlop: Well it may well do, but the realities are that the whole climate debate in this country has been bedeviled for the last 20 years by extremist views. I mean you either are pro or anti, there's nothing in between. You either believe in climate change or you don't. The reality is it's an incredibly complex issue. The changes that are occurring are probably a combination of both human-induced and natural changes, but the scientific evidence is pointing more and more to the fact that the human impact is by far the majority impact that is currently going on. Now I mean, this is risk management, and uncertainty management. We won't have the absolute answer, probably for another, maybe 50 years or so, in terms of exactly what's happening, because of the complexity. But in the circumstances we're in, you see what's happening around us, you see the Arctic melt and the summer ice melting, you see the Amazon rainforest shrinking, you see what's happening in the Barrier Reef, you can see the sort of impact we've had on fires for example, in Victoria. We just can't keep sitting there all the time, saying, 'Well that's nothing to do with climate change'. There comes a point when you just have to acknowledge that unfortunately those are the realities.

And another dimension to this, is that the sceptics will argue that this is all due to natural causes. Well, think about it, if that's true, then we actually have an even bigger problem, because what's occurring, we have virtually no means of containing. Whereas at least if it's human-induced, we have a chance of actually getting a hold of the problem and containing it.

Whichever way you look at it, with the evidence that's now in, I think hopefully the sceptics will be convinced over the next little while, that this has actually now moved to a completely different level, and needs a completely different approach.

Alexandra de Blas: How will you build on Al Gore's Repowering America?

Ian Dunlop: What Al Gore's done is an example of the sort of things we will be trying to do. I mean he's said that the US can move to a completely renewable, zero carbon electricity generation sector within the space of 10 years. And he's done that on the basis of very solid engineering and scientific advice, as to how you can go about it, so it's very solidly backed and really, that's what we're trying to do. I mean we will get the best information we can, pull it together in a way that demonstrates that this is quite practical, this is not airy-fairy stuff, it's hard-nosed, practical business case, to move it all forward.

I think we're going to be quite surprised by what happens, because once it's clear that we really have to move on this stuff, and carbon is going to be priced sensibly, and not at minimal levels, but at the levels we need to make the change, then I think you're going to see all sorts of technological innovation happen that we haven't even thought about.

Alexandra de Blas: Ian Dunlop.

The McCaughey Centre, at the University of Melbourne, supports work that strengthens our understanding of the sources of health and wellbeing in communities across Australia. It's situated within the School of Population Health, and Professor John Wiseman is its director. He says the evidence is now in that there are links between climate change, health and wellbeing.

John Wiseman: The evidence is in firstly in relation to the direct impacts of climate change on health, so publications recently by the World Health Organisation, by The Lancet, show the direct links between climate change and health, the impacts of extreme weather events like bushfires, like floods, like cyclones, the impact of heatwaves, the impact of diseases from mosquitoes and other insects, all of these are starting to be quite clear in Australia and particularly of course in the developing world.

Secondly there are important connections between climate change and the underlying sources of wellbeing: food and water and shelter and energy are all being impacted already. We can see that most obviously in relation to water, in Australia, in India, in the Middle East, but we will also start to see the impacts in relation to food, in relation to the cost of energy, in relation to the cost of housing.

Alexandra de Blas: Is there a spiritual component here?

John Wiseman: I think there is not just a spiritual component, but a psychological, emotional and spiritual component to climate change. That's direct, of course, when we think of the emotional impact, the psychological impact of major events such as bushfires, and floods, but there's also a broader implication for a sense of meaning which people have in their lives, the sense of future, the sense of knowing the kind of world that their children and grandchildren are going to live in. So in that sense, climate change also has a very profound philosophical and emotional and indeed spiritual dimension.

John Wiseman: The transition plan is all about identifying practical solutions for making sure that Australia can play its full role in restoring a safe climate for Australia and the planet. One of the greatest challenges I think with climate change is it's easy to portray the range of concerns, the range of fears, and to talk about the danger of catastrophe, and the dangers are real. But what we think is now clear, is that it is also vital to articulate a sense of possibility that there are real actions that can be taken that will make a difference. So the purpose of Safe Climate Australia is to articulate very practical, effective strategies, and to therefore make a real difference. And in doing so, also create a genuine and substantial sense of possibility and hope.

Al Gore: Our children not too many years from now, will look back at the beginning of this 21st century and they will look around them at the circumstances they inherit from us, and depending upon what their lives are like, they will ask one of two questions to us: If the North Polar icecap and the Great Barrier Reef and the health of the ecological systems upon which we depend have been destroyed, degraded beyond repair, and if the world is spinning towards the catastrophe foretold, they would be justified in asking of us, What were you thinking? Why didn't you listen to what the scientists were saying? Did you not notice, were you distracted? Did you not care?

I want them to ask a second question. If they look around them and they see an economy in renewal and an ecological system that is beginning to heal, with people turning to a common purpose to make the climate safe, and to put people to work on a continuing basis to seize these new opportunities, I want them to look back and ask How did you find the moral courage to rise up and solve a crisis that so many pessimists said was impossible to solve? And part of the answer will be that in Melbourne, Australia, a movement gained force with men and women from every part of that great nation, from every perspective, from every profession, coming together to say 'We do understand, we know things are different, we know we have a challenge, and we will respond.'

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for being here.

[Applause...]

Antony Funnell: And that report was from Alexandra de Blas.

Thanks to my co-producer Andrew Davies, and to sound technician Peter McMurray. Also thanks to John Cochrane.

Now here's an interesting question for you: Should video game and internet addiction be acknowledged as a recognised clinical condition?

And here's another: Does internet addiction actually exist?

Well if you join Robyn Williams on The Science Show this Saturday at noon, that's what the discussion's about. They're running a series called 'Hooked on the Net'. And they're looking for your input, so check out their website and just click on the relevant stories to contribute or have your say.

Now next week on Future Tense, 'Death in the 21st century', the way in which technology is affecting our relationship to the dead and dying. Among our guests will be Associate Professor Helen Ennis, from the Australian National University and Griffith University's Dr Margaret Gibson. Here's a quick preview.

Margaret Gibson: We can't reach out and touch death when we're looking at it on a computer monitor or a television screen, you know, it's purely a visual experience. So even though we could be moved by that experience, it sort of cuts us off from our other senses, so we don't hear things, we don't smell, we don't touch our relationship to death, which we do have when it's in a face-to-face experience, or where we're witnessing a loved one dying. All our senses are kind of integrated in that experience. So I think we're more alienated now through what's often called the scopic regime that we live in, that everything is processed through the eye, you know, it's an optical kind of visual culture that we live in, which means that we can look at things up close, but it's always at a distance, if you know what I mean. So we can bring things to our eyes, we can inspect death in this very intense, visual way, but we know it's not really going to touch us, or we're not really going to touch it. So there's a kind of safety in that, but there's also an alienation as well.

Antony Funnell: That's 'Death in the 21st century', next week on Future Tense.

Guests

Al Gore

Former Vice President of the United States, environmental activist and founder of Repower America.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Safe Climate Australia foundation member and Director for the Centre for Marine Studies, University of Queensland.